When Gossip Girl premiered on the CW network on September 19, 2007, its central character was a girl who had everything. Blair Waldorf lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. She wore headbands that cost more than most people’s rent. She attended the kind of prep school that generated its own mythology. She had a mother who was a famous fashion designer and a best friend who was effortlessly beautiful and a social position that was, by any measure available to a teenager in the zip code of 10021, impeccable. Blair was wealthy, poised, immaculately groomed, and accustomed to getting what she wanted from a world that had been arranged, more or less, for her convenience.
The actress playing her was Leighton Meester. She was twenty-one years old when the show premiered, and she was playing a character whose ZIP code and wardrobe and prep school ambitions were about as far from her own biography as it was possible to travel without leaving the planet. She had grown up in Marco Island, Florida, after a period in a halfway house as an infant. Her parents had been serving federal sentences for drug trafficking when she was born. Gas money and food had been, at various points in her childhood, genuine concerns. She had skipped her prom partly because the ticket cost too much.
The distance between Leighton Meester’s actual early life and the fictional life of Blair Waldorf is the central irony of her career’s most famous chapter. It is also, if you pay attention to what Meester has said in interviews across the years, something more specific than irony: an illustration of the gap between the public image that celebrity creates and the private history that it tends to flatten.